[3] For the supporting cast it was agreed that the show required a strong team of versatile comedy actors who could play a wide range of parts.
From revue[n 1] the show featured the actors Ron Moody and Hugh Paddick and the singer Pat Lancaster; from BBC television, Betty Marsden; and from radio Kenneth Williams.
The BBC proposed to continue without him, keeping Horne and the team together in a show provisionally titled It's Ken Again, to be written by Took and his new writing partner, Marty Feldman.
"[11] Nevertheless, in the words of the BBC, "While Beyond Our Ken might have been outshone by its successor, it shared much of the same DNA that made Round the Horne one of the greats".
[12] Like ITMA and Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh before it, Beyond Our Ken interspersed comic sections with musical interludes, but it differed from them and all its other predecessors in the way the show opened each week.
After that the announcer, Douglas Smith, would welcome listeners and introduce the fictional guests appearing that week, such as "General Sir Gertrude Fanshawe, Marion Haste, The House of Lords Banjo Octet, Dizzy Barbirolli, and of course Mr Kenneth Horne, who prefers to remain anonymous".
Marsden's hoarse-voiced Fanny Haddock, Pertwee's camp Hanky Flowerd, Paddick's gormless Ricky Livid and Williams's suggestive rustic Arthur Fallowfield parodied, respectively, the cook Fanny Cradock, the comedian Frankie Howerd, the pop star Marty Wilde and the West country farmer and pundit Ralph Wightman.
[14] Some of these characters had their own catch-phrases: Ricky Livid's was "I like the backing", and Fallowfield's response to every question began "The answer lies in the soil".
[5] Elsewhere in the programmes the regular characters included Ambrose and Felicity (described by Took as "a pair of doddering old idiots"),[5] played by Williams and Marsden.
[5] Another – unnamed – ancient personage, played by Williams, had been doing whatever he was doing on each programme for "thirty-five years";[5] Stanley Birkinshaw (Paddick) was a man with ill-fitting false teeth speaking with distorted sibilants and spraying saliva in all directions.